About this post:
This post was written by Inês, a very talented lady who usually shares her creativity over at Aramar. If you want to read more or have a look at her amazing photographs make sure you check out her blog.
Last September I went to Venice for the first time. One can hardly call this an insightful post about Venice… after all I stayed there for six hours. But since it took me three and a half hours to get there by train from Milan, I’ll keep on considering this as real travelling.
So, first impressions on Venice right after I got out from the train station: there’s a Portuguese expression that we use when we feel a bit claustrophobic, which is “I feel like a canned sardine”. Now that’s exactly what came to my mind at that moment. I could see people everywhere, and they clearly had an agenda, that I can only imagine as something like this: “The last person to arrive at the Piazza San Marco is a rotten egg!!”
As you can see, I’m a very optimistic girl and, naturally, faced the next hours with a look of despair. Here’s an important fact: I wasn’t travelling alone. When you travel with a group you have to make concessions. So, instead of escaping to the more deserted streets of Venice, there I went to the Piazza San Marco via the street with the biggest number of tourists per square meter. That’s what happens when cruise ships pour tourists into a small place filled with canals every 15 minutes.
Now, not everything was bad. I got to talk with an old Venetian man that told me how many bridges and churches there are in Venice, and explained me the meaning behind several of their names. Plus, there was also the time when we got lost and managed to find the way to the piazza by following handwritten directions in several walls. Not to mention the magical and also somewhat decadent atmosphere of the city.
I took lots of film photos during the day, as a way of making myself look closely at the details. It was only after seeing the developed photos that I was sure I had been there, and that Venice is beautiful, even in the midst of all the confusion.
